Xandros has announced the end of Linspire. The company says that it had too many for-pay distributions running around in the company portfolio, so one was bound to be cut. Linspire didn't make it. "Xandros purchased Linspire, the company, earlier this summer. This week, the company announced that it was going to revamp community distribution Freespire, basing its next version on Debian instead of Ubuntu, and using it as a precursor for Xandros Desktop Professional, in much the same way Red Hat uses Fedora and SUSE uses openSUSE. But the company didn't need multiple for-pay desktop distributions, so Linspire is getting the boot."

Linux has the advantage to provide native commercial application such as some free Adobe products (Adobe Reader and Adobe Flash Player), while you need a compatibility layer with *BSD. Although this may not be a problem for some people.